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Morandi, Relationships, Fascism, Still Life

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Morandi, Relationships, Fascism, Still Life Morandi, Relationships, Fascism, Still Life By William Eaton Zeteo is Looking and Listening, November 2015 This pdf is text only; to see the images visit Zeteo Living with the objects, they became his family, his neighbors, his friends. — Janet Abramowicz, former assistant to Morandi You don’t have to paint a figure to express human feelings. — Robert Motherwell1 (1) For what, in the past year, have been revealed to be psychological reasons, I have long been drawn to the still lifes of the twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, one of the great still-life painters, etchers, and watercolorists. There is a dominant interpretation of Morandi’s work, and the primary purpose of the present set of notes is to bring out of the shadows quite another interpretation. Subsequently and, in a sense, challenging the interpretation I am about to advance, I will discuss Morandi’s connections to Italian fascism and how these connections may lead us to interpret or see the work in yet other ways. There may be those who wish for one of these three interpretations to be the right one. In fact, we are here only scratching the surface; it is easy enough, for example, to see a great deal of Morandi’s paintings—still lifes and landscapes—as being of walls, or of buildings and architecture more generally. As for right or best, I will say, rather, that, 1 Abramowicz made this statement at a discussion at the Center for Italian Modern Art, 7 November 2015. More from this discussion soon to come. I have not been able to track down the source of the Motherwell statement. It is all over the Web and, as with the Motherwell statement in a later footnote, it is quoted in Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, a 2015 American documentary film directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland. William Eaton is the Editor of Zeteo. A collection of his essays, Surviving the Twenty-First Century, was recently published by Serving House Books. cognizant of all these possibilities, we can see more in Morandi’s work and in individual pieces than we might without such a range. In harmony with the ideas Oscar Wilde championed in The Critic as Artist, I would say that the richness of an artist’s work is—to a rather greater extent than we realize or would like to admit—a function of the richness of the interpretations that curators, critics, and historians are able to offer. (The art market and the self-interests of academia obviously playing large roles here.) We will get to Morandi right below, after these wise and beautiful words from Wilde. Thanks to great critics, he proposes, a picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?’ He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting- point for a new creation. It does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.2 2 Wilde, The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks upon the Importance of Doing Nothing; A Dialogue. This work was published in 1891 in Wilde’s collection Intentions, which is now available thanks to Forgotten Books’ Classic Reprint Series. The quotation appears on page 140 of that edition. The dialogue has also been available online. Note that I have broken the original text into two paragraphs to facilitate reading. Eaton / Morandi—Relationships / Zeteo is Looking and Listening / 2 (2) The dominant interpretation is that Morandi’s work is pure painting, art for art’s sake, the beauty of light, color, and form which refers to or represents nothing but light, color, and form. In October, on a wall at a Morandi exhibition at MAMbo (Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna), I found the kind of curatorial observation one finds routinely at Morandi exhibitions: For Morandi “[s]till lifes and landscapes merely constituted ways to break down the depiction of the subjects and instead focus on the practice of painting itself.”3 And the press release for the 2015 Morandi show at the David Zwirner gallery quoted from a translation of one Morandi’s post-World-War-II letters: “The only interest the visible world awakens in me concerns space, light, color, and form.” (Pair this with the unforgettable line from Morandi’s very brief, 1928 autobiography: “Ebbi molta fede nel Fascismo fin dai primi accenni, fede che non mi venne mai meno, neppure nei giorni più grigi e tempestosi.” The great faith I have had in Fascism from the outset has remained intact even in the darkest and stormiest days.4) Parts (6) and (7) of the present piece will discuss Morandi and fascism. What I wish, nonetheless, to say first and foremost is that the most engaging and evocative of Morandi’s works—for all their ostensible subjects are a limited range of bottles, tin boxes, and so forth—speak, however noiselessly, about a particular set of human relationships (and these are not the kinds of relationships we usually associate with fascism). Morandi’s object- subjects may be seen as family members or, say, as a few neighbors or strangers in a store or at a bus stop. Further, the paintings—independently of the artist’s conscious intentions, I presume—focus on two particular aspects of human relationships. One is the distance— physically minimal but psychologically unbridgeable—between an “I” and others. The second is how in small groups we take our positions and poses, play our roles, in response to or in dialogue with the positions, poses, and roles of others nearby. (For instance, one person’s height or beauty may lead others to feel less tall or less beautiful and to “position” themselves in relation to this other person’s outstanding feature, so that, for example, I might feel belittled in a tall man’s company, or I might feel defiant—sticking my chest or chin out, turning my back, laughing loudly.) Nowadays such posturing is perhaps most often 3 In addition to the still life paintings of objects for which he is currently most famous, Morandi also did: some paintings of flowers in vases; landscape paintings most notable for their lack of human beings or human elements besides walls; exquisite etchings of the same objects (and relationships) as in his paintings; many drawings; and watercolors. I do not know if there has ever been an exhibit devoted entirely to these latter works. I certainly look forward to one, as the Morandi watercolors I have seen here and there appear to be, as I have previously written, among the most exquisite art works of the twentieth century. I would also note here how prolific Morandi was. He lived from 1890 to 1964, and left the world about 1,500 oil paintings, 300 watercolors, and 150 engravings, plus the drawings. MAMbo’s exhibition was a temporary installation pending the renovation of the Museo Morandi in Bologna, which renovation, I believe, is now complete. In Bologna, it is now also possible to visit, by pre- arrangement, Morandi’s former bedroom-studio in Bologna. 4 Giorgio Morandi, “Autobiografia,” L’Assalto, Bologna, 31 December 1928. Eaton / Morandi—Relationships / Zeteo is Looking and Listening / 3 observed in the many meetings of contemporary office life, but, again, Morandi’s work seems more concerned with other gatherings. The 1957 still life pictured at right [see zeteojournal.com for images] offers a simple example.5 It is important to note that the light in Morandi’s studio was not bright and that his paintings do not depict the light and shadows related to particular objects placed in a particular way or in a particular relationship to light sources. We might think of the shadows as being as much subjects of the paintings as the bottles are. And, with the 1957 painting, one of the first things we notice, in addition to the simplicity of the scene and the varying heights of the objects, is how the shadow of the smaller white bottle curves, neck-like, along the side of the larger bottle.
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